


The Visitor

by arboretum



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-23 04:53:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17073839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboretum/pseuds/arboretum
Summary: I wrote all of this as I played the game (MGSV), trying to make sense of it, so my point of view hm, certainly did, hm, shift, as I went along LMFAO. this uh, was very early on in the game. I did not. know. :) :) :) :):)





	1. Chapter 1

He visited the infirmary three times in the first twenty-four hours.  The first time, he was careless.  He walked in and was immediately spotted.  Two nurses took him by the elbows and directed him away.  The curtain swung shut with a swift rattle; then there were hands on his face, peeling up his sleeves, dabbing blood from his scrapes.

“It’s nothing,” he tried to say.  Just a graze on his temple from when he’d had to dive for cover too hastily; a couple of scrapes and a couple of bruises.  He was out of shape, but.  “I’m fine.  Really.”

“Nonsense, Boss,” they said, but when they got his shirt off and saw his chest they fell silent.  He looked down and saw what they saw: the bruise, long and mottled, stretching from his hip to his ribs.  He began to protest again.  Then he saw the scar.

He looked up at the nurses, and they didn’t seem to want to meet his eyes.  That was fine.  He took their hesitation for permission, put his shirt back on, and left.

The second time, he took more care.  He was clean, quiet.  He waited for the attending physician to leave before he slipped in.  It was 02:00, and everyone was asleep.  He had spent the evening walking the decks of Mother Base, hand on steel, feeling strange.  Nothing was as it should be.

Now he stood in front of Kaz’s cot, the machines beeping and whirring, a low fluorescent light washing the room in dim blues and greens.  He found the chart and checked it.  A morphine and cefazolin drip.

There was a chair nearby, so he pulled it up and sat down.  Kaz’s face was drawn and haggard.  They had taken off his glasses again and put them neatly folded on the bedside table, a cheap plastic thing someone had scavenged up.  He looked different, Snake thought.  He looked bad.  Older, and his captors had not been kind.

He took Kaz’s hand and felt it, warm and heavy in his own palm.  Kaz did not do him the favor of waking up and saying something, and Snake did not know how to talk to an unresponsive body.  Eventually he said, “I’m glad you didn’t burn.”

It didn’t seem exactly what he wanted to say, but he didn’t know what he wanted to say.  He felt dead, but that wasn’t a new feeling either.

They found him a few hours later, asleep on the chair with his head pillowed against Kaz’s thigh.  He became aware, blearily, to a round of three appalled medics’ faces looking down at him, a cascading whisper of, “Boss.”  “Boss, please.”  “You can’t sleep here like this, Boss.”

Ocelot emerged from behind the small cadre and gave him an inscrutable look.  “Sorry,” he said, and awkwardly proffered his hand. “I forgot to tell you where you sleep.”

The third time he came to see Kaz, Ocelot found him in less than ten minutes.  He began to suspect the man of tailing him.

“Look,” said Ocelot, and folded, then unfolded his arms.  “I have some things I want you to do.  A little fieldwork.”  He must have seen something in the look on Big Boss’s face, because he cleared his throat quickly, then added, straightening himself out, “It’ll be good for you.  Get your mind off things and get you back on your feet.”

 

* * *

 

The hostage was on the chopper, and Snake was swinging himself up when the call came through.

“He’s been discharged,” said Ocelot.  “Thought you might want to know.”

 

* * *

 

He paused in the doorway, eyed the bottle, then the man holding the bottle, and raised his eyebrows infinitesimally.

“Are you allowed to be drinking right now?”

“No one told me not to,” Kaz said, and, setting the bottle down, waved him to the empty seat.

Snake pulled it up.  Documents and maps lay spread haphazardly on the table before them.  He recognized some of the pictures; he’d pulled them from the field only yesterday.

“Working?” said Snake.  “Already?”

“The best cure.”

It was late in the afternoon, the sun coming in through the open door golden and hazy with the humidity.  Light glinted off the wine bottle, Kaz’s sunglasses, a hunk of quartz he’d been using as a paperweight.  Kaz had commandeered himself a cabin four flights up, for some reason.  If nothing else, the view out the door was stellar: an unobstructed and endless vista of ocean.

“How about you?” Kaz said.  “Back to your old self?”

Snake flexed his hand, then his prosthetic, and shrugged.  “I’m creaky,” he said.  “Got old before I knew it was happening.”

Kaz snorted.

“Otherwise,” said Snake, “Pretty good.”

He looked at the paperwork and considered offering to help, then reconsidered.  He’d never been very good with intel.

“How about you?  How are you doing?”

“Me?”  Kaz smiled and gestured vaguely with his one hand.  “Missing a few pieces.”

“Yeah,” said Snake.

“Otherwise, pretty good.”

“I guess you are.”

Kaz looked better at least.  Cleaned up, sleeve pinned, hair neat.  You didn’t really notice the peg leg unless he got up and started walking.  Snake had sidled into the makeshift infirmary on his way over and wrung some info out of the attending doctor.  He’d be using a crutch for a while, she said, but eventually he’d get around without one.  His gait would never be the same, of course, and it’d be harder for him to balance without the other arm, but he’d learn to compensate.  Though, speaking of which, since the Boss was here, did he think he could have a chat with the commander?  No one else had been able to get through to him, but maybe if Big Boss himself asked, he’d reconsider a bionic prosthesis?  The technology was really very good these days, and actually how was the Boss’s arm holding up, anyway?

Snake looked at the space where Kaz’s arm used to be, and then he reached for the wine.  It turned out to be terrible.  He set it down again and read the label.  Bordeaux, 1972.

“Is this—?”

Kaz glanced up from his reading.  “Yeah,” he said.  “No.  Kind of.”  He ran his hand through his hair, and some of it came loose from the impeccable coifing.  “I found a case of it about a year later.  Everything went up in the explosion, you know.  But they always said ’72 was a bad year.  So I saw it, dirt cheap, and I thought, why not?  For old times’ sake.”

“Cécile hated this stuff.”

“She liked it,” Kaz said, smiling wryly.  “She probably drank a whole case on her own.  Never seen a woman hold her drink like that.  I thought the wine might soften her up a bit, but the more she drank, the pricklier she got.”

Snake remembered.

“She made it out ok?”

Kaz nodded.  “Back in France.”

“That’s good.”

There was a shelf in the back corner of the room.  It was sparse, a tangle of wires and radio equipment, a few tottering binders bursting with paperwork, a crusty old mug, a folded cardboard box.  A cot on the wall nearer to the door, bedspread rumpled and unmade.  A faded calendar and a couple of peeling photographs taped above the pillow, too hard to make out the subject.

When he looked back again he found that Kaz was watching him, eyes dark and unreadable behind his glasses.

So much had happened, Snake thought, that he would never know.

“I’m sorry,” said Snake.

“Boss?”

“Sorry it took me so long.”

Kaz looked away first, and Snake respectfully looked out the door with him.  The sun was setting, long blinding rays streaking across the gentle waves.

“I missed you,” said Kaz.

“I know,” said Snake.

 

* * *

 

“I came to see you once,” Kaz said. He was back on his feet again, his sunglasses on, his sleeve neatly pinned. The sunlight streaming in through the open door lit his hair up like a halo. “Back when you were on Cyprus.”

“Oh?” said Snake. They sat kitty cornered at a small wooden table, a map of Afghanistan and a mess of paperwork spread before them, the operation they had been discussing momentarily forgotten.

“I’m not the best at stealth, I’m no Big Boss, you know. I didn’t want to risk being followed. But I did come by once, after you’d been settled in there for a while.”

Snake waited.

“You didn’t look so hot,” Kaz laughed.

“You don’t look so good yourself,” said Snake.

“Hey, nine years can be rough on a guy.”

“Hm,” said Snake.

“Doesn’t feel like it to you, does it?”

“No,” said Snake.

Kaz looked down and away, and Snake followed his gaze to the table, where his one good hand lay on the woodgrain, gloved and loosely clenched.

“The last thing I remember is fire and smoke,” Snake said. “The whole base going up in flames.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday, too,” Kaz said, voice tight.

“Then I woke in the hospital. There was an assassin. A strike team. The doctors, the patients. Blood and fire, everything and everyone in flames again. Then Ocelot. Then you.” He paused, and looked up expectantly. “In between, nothing.”

“Must have been a shock.”

“Hm,” Snake agreed. “Weird not being on fire.”

“Haha.”

The sounds of Mother Base winding down for the afternoon filtered in from outside. Friendly shouts, the distant sound of laughter, a clatter and a shout as someone dropped something. It was incongruous. Strange, and equal parts comforting and discomfiting, like he had been ripped from one world and dropped into another, almost the same, but slightly different.

“Do I really look so different?” Kaz said.

“Other than the arm and the leg?”

Kaz smiled, but there was a tightness to the set of his mouth, and his eyes were unreadable behind the dark glasses.

“You look different,” Snake said. He waited for Kaz to meet his eyes, then added, “But in a good way.”

“What does that mean?”

“You look real.”

The smile softened and Kaz turned away, looking out the door, over the blacktop deck and the vast glittering expanse of ocean. “I always believed you’d wake up,” he said. “I was waiting. This whole time. I knew you’d come back.”

In the mess hall that night, they sat facing each other at the end of a long table, the room buzzing around them with the sounds of dinner. They watched each other eat in silence, Kaz pushing peas around on the plate with his fork, Snake clanking every time he touched something with his left arm, and no one bothered them. At the end of it, Snake offered Kaz a hand up, and he said, “Ocelot put me in a room on the upper deck —“

“Come back with me,” Kaz said.

 

* * *

 

There were a lot of things Snake wanted to say to Kaz. He was sorry, and sad, and grateful, and glad, all at the same time; he wasn’t sure what he was. Nine years. The universe had shifted without him, and nothing made sense anymore except Kaz, and even Kaz only barely. He reached out and put his hand on Kaz’s.

“I’m back,” he said. He joined their fingers together and said again, “I’m back.”

 

* * *

 

He slept in the field as often as not. It was peaceful out in the open. Quiet. He’d get off the beaten track a ways, find a nook in the side of the mountain, or an overhang by a creek, and set his horse out to graze. There was nothing around him but the smell of dry grass and the sound of small creatures rustling through the undergrowth. Out there, it was just him and the earth. He felt small and alone, and it was strangely comforting. In the dark, he would look up at the stars in the sky and think about the Boss, her tiny star hovering just below orbit, looking down at the blue planet far below her. He thought about how for just a moment in April of 1961, she had looked down from the heavens and seen everything.

Not him, though, he thought. From all the way up there, he would have been too small to see.

Back on base, he found it difficult to sleep. It was home, but he would wake up remembering the flames, the struts coming down, and then lie sweating in the dark until his heart rate calmed. Besides the room allotted to him as his quarters, there were dormitories on every platform for the recruits. He tried sneaking in there once or twice too, but was found out more often than not, to a round of awed whispers, and he’d have to duck back out again, feeling embarrassed and out of his depth. On the occasions he didn’t get caught, he didn’t find he slept much better in a bunk either.

Eventually he made his way to Kaz’s room. Kaz opened for him on the second rap, and silently let him in.

He moved his things over the next day.

After a week, Ocelot, passing him on the way to the chopper, said without looking at him, “If you’re not using the room, we’ll annex it to the records room; we’re running low on space, anyway.”

“Sure,” Snake said.


	2. misc outtakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> no rhyme or reason, not sure where these were meant to go if anywhere, but i'll just! paste them all in! since i'm bulk uploading tonight!

He noticed Ocelot watching him a lot after a while, but he didn’t really want to say anything about it. He would be walking along in the shade on the west end of the R&D platform when he’d feel it, a prickling sensation along the back of his neck, and he’d make a turn to where he knew there was a mirror and glance in and up, and there Ocelot would be, lounging carelessly two stories up, pretending he wasn’t looking. It seemed like he thought he was being stealthy, and Snake didn’t see any point in confronting him about it. Instead, he turned it into a practical lesson, disappeared sometimes on Ocelot suddenly and without warning, and felt a small rumble of joy in his gut when he heard, from a distance, a muffled Russian swear.

If he wanted to keep tabs on Big Boss, then he could just step up his game.

It was a particular favorite game of Snake’s to kidnap the dog.

“You know, he’s working hard training that dog, and you’re messing it up doing this,” Kaz said mildly, once, when Snake showed up at his door with DD tucked under his arm.

“The challenge is good for him,” Snake said, put DD on the table, and proceeded to feed him strips of beef jerky out of his pack one after another, to DD’s unending joy.

“He is cute, I’ll give him that,” Kaz said. He began to shuffle papers, lining them up against the wall to get the stacks flush. “Are you leaving again tonight?”

 

* * *

 

Snake didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t, just edged forward on the bench until he could get a hand on Kaz’s back, thinking if he could just touch him it would ground them both. He didn’t expect Kaz to let out a breath the way he did, or to say, “Snake,” low and quiet, like that.

It seemed obvious then, what he had to do.

In their years before in the Caribbean, they had lived together, worked together, fought together, killed together. They had stitched each others’ wounds and tended each others’ griefs, and they had shared everything, a common goal, a common life, a common home. They had fucked sometimes, when the urge had struck them, and once, when Kaz had been very drunk, they had kissed and made out for a long hour, fumbling in the dark, and Snake had not minded it. But they had never done this.

He looped his arm around Kaz’s middle, put his face into the nape of his neck, and held him. It felt selfish, and good, to have Kaz’s heart beating under his palm, to feel the rise and fall of his chest, and he wanted him to know that he was grateful, and that he was glad, but he didn’t have the words to say it.

They sat like that for a long while, watching the sun slowly set over the Indian Ocean. Eventually, Kaz patted Snake’s hand with his own, and said, “Let’s get back to business.”


End file.
